5 Simple Ways to Make Your Recruitment More Diverse

A key part of any recruitment process is ensuring it is as diverse as possible. Taking steps to attract a range of applicants and to avoid any potential bias could help you secure a more diverse workforce, which has a number of benefits for any organizations.

Companies that hire a more diverse workforce can benefit from increased profitability due to the increase in experiences, ideas backgrounds and perspectives, helping to drive projects and processes. Social Talent also highlights the fact that increased diversity leads to greater employee engagement, aiding productivity, as well as a better level of candidate attraction.

However, in order to enjoy these benefits, you need to ensure your recruitment processes actively encourage diversity. Not only will this mean you end up with a more varied workforce, it will also increase the diversity of applicants in the first place.

To help you achieve this, here are five ways to make your recruitment more diverse:

Develop a diversity strategy

In order to make significant steps in diversifying your recruitment, you need to look at implementing a diversity strategy. While Service Futures highlights that these strategies can be hard to implement, having one ensures that your recruitment practices have clear targets and steps to take when it comes to resulting in a more diverse workforce.

Not only does a diversity strategy include ways of making recruitment diverse, you should also focus on changing company culture so your business is a better environment for a range of employees. This means getting management buy-in, ensuring your strategy is constantly communicated to all workers via a number of methods and that a plan is in place that can be followed and measured.

Not having a plan for making recruitment and your organization more diverse means that there is a greater chance you will not meet your targets. This plan should include how you plan to make diversity a key aspect of the company and not just a stand-alone HR project.

Look at your job listings

The first part of the recruitment process is the job listing you use to attract candidates to apply for a position. These listings may seem fairly straightforward, but as Envato Tuts+ points out, the way you phrase certain things or describe the job can make it more likely that you'll get applications from one type of candidate.

Word choice, layout and the way you talk about the company can all put off certain candidates, meaning your diverse recruitment efforts fall at the first hurdle. To ensure that your job listings are as neutral as possible, there are a number of online tools you can use to assess them before you set them live.

Even having several people check them over to get their opinion on what you can do to improve them can make listings more suitable for a broader range of candidates.

Reduce unconscious bias

Unconscious bias can affect who gets through to the next stage of recruitment and whether they are successful at the interview stage. This is why it is a good idea to take steps to reduce the effect of unconscious bias as much as possible.

One option is to use blind recruitment, which Fast Company suggests could help lead to a more diverse workforce. It is when personally identifiable information - such as name, age, gender and education - is removed from CVs before they are passed onto those deciding who will progress in their application.

This method means that the focus on candidates' suitability for a role starts off on an even playing field. Not only can this help to encourage a greater mix of applicants, it ensures that aspects that are really important to recruitment are fully taken into account.

Look at workplace policies

Certain workplace policies can help attract a more diverse range of candidates, so it is worth assessing what policies can be altered or introduced in order to achieve this. Ideal reports that one of the biggest factors for many workers is a company focus on work/life balance, with policies like flexible working helping to attract more female applicants.

Introducing flexible office hours and options for remote working could help employees develop a better balance between work and home, ensuring retention of a diverse workforce, as well as helping you attract a broader range of candidates.

It is a good idea to discuss options with existing employees in order to assess what they believe is missing from the workplace culture and what politics could help with recruitment and retention. This will also allow you to address any existing problems that could be causing problems for current staff members, as well as potential issues when it comes to attracting the right candidates.

Pick one metric to measure success

Of course, to assess whether your diversity strategies are working, you need to know how to measure your progress. The easiest way to do this is to choose a single metric to measure, as this ensures you can fully focus on reaching one target rather than several.

Choose the diversity aspect that is your main focus and look at how you are going to measure it, such as increasing the percentage of women within a certain sector of your company. This will enable you to see what worked and what didn't, which is important for informing your next target and altering strategy to ensure better levels of success.